The Canadian media guru’s stature and influence are once again on the rise. Some now call him The First Seer of Cyberspace.

If Marshall McLuhan were alive today, there isn’t much that would surprise him — not the Internet, or Google, or Twitter, or WikiLeaks, or even the phone-hacking scandal now transfixing much of the U.K.

In broad outline, if not in precise detail, he predicted all of these and more.

“Rereading him, I still get new insights,” says Robert Logan, a former colleague of the Canadian media guru some now call The First Seer of Cyberspace. “The man was a total genius. If he came back today, on his 100th anniversary, he would say, ‘Yeah, that’s about what I expected — and people haven’t learned a thing.”

Possibly, they never will.

Or maybe the heightened popular interest and critical attention being accorded McLuhan during this, the centenary of his birth, may yet help us fumble toward a clearer understanding of the parlous digital world that he anticipated and whose name he coined — the global village.

“McLuhan’s value today lies in applying his methods,” says Mark Federman, former chief strategist at the McLuhan Centre in Culture and Technology at the University of Toronto. “It’s cool that he predicted the future, but what we should do is learn from his methods.”

Those methods aren’t easy to summarize, much less emulate, and there is considerable disagreement among academics about the meaning of McLuhan’s often cryptic or even oxymoronic pronouncements — “the future of the future is the present,” for example, or “the effects come first; the causes, later” — but there is no doubt the man’s stature and influence are firmly in the ascendant once again, after a long period of decline.

More than anything else, it’s the frenetic expansion of the Internet in recent years that has renewed international fascination with the Canadian communications visionary who was born in Edmonton in 1911 and died in Toronto in 1980 at the age of 69. He would have turned 100 this coming Thursday.

“In North America, for quite a long time, he was considered the most overrated media guru of all time,” says B.W. Powe, a former student of McLuhan’s and now a professor of English at York University. Powe recently returned from a European speaking tour that included talks on McLuhan’s work in Naples, Bologna and Barcelona, among other cities.

“McLuhan is still ahead of us,” he says.

McLuhan’s hotly debated star is likely as high now as it was during his glory years at the University of Toronto in the 1960s and 1970s, when he was busily charting the topography of an electronically connected world that was a looming reality then and seems nearly all-pervasive now.

Wired magazine recently proclaimed McLuhan as its “patron saint,” marking his posthumous return to the kind of celebrity he enjoyed three or four decades ago when he was a cult figure in Canada, the United States and much of the world — a dapper, erudite visionary who spoke in a Delphic, aphoristic style that seemed to owe as much to poetry as science.

The most influential publications in the world — Newsweek, Time, The New York Times, among others — clamoured to promote his ideas and to parse his aphorisms in their pages.

Then, as now, it often seemed his words could mean almost anything or, perhaps, almost everything.

“With any profound thinker who is ahead of us, there will be as many interpretations as there are people wandering in the desert,” says Powe. “People forget his roots are in poetry, literature, the artifact of the word. He spoke poetically and aphoristically, and that leads to interpretation.”

McLuhan’s best-known book — with the seemingly prosaic title Understanding Media — appeared in 1964 and soon gave birth to an intellectual cottage industry that brought together pipe-smoking professors and leather-jacketed students in university common rooms and lecture halls around the world: Understanding (or Misunderstanding) McLuhan.

The debate goes on.

This year, and especially this month, a new generation of scholars is joining its counterparts from generations past, as McLuhanites around the world mark the century that has clocked past since his birth. They are holding discussions, listening to lectures, attending multimedia displays and generally reconsidering the theories of the man who became famous for proposing — among much else — that the medium is the message and the content is us.

Born into a middle-class Alberta household, McLuhan was educated in Canada and later in Britain, where he studied at Cambridge University. He returned to North America in 1936.

A decade later, he took up a faculty position at St. Michael’s College, a Catholic enclave at the University of Toronto. By then he was married — to Corinne Lewis, originally from Texas — and had converted to Roman Catholicism. The couple would eventually have six children.

“He was a mystic Catholic humanist,” says Powe. “He was not an optimist but a man of hope.”

He was also fated to be a target of misunderstanding.

As McLuhan’s fame and influence grew, it became common in the public mind to perceive him as a champion of the phenomena he studied — as an advocate of the digital revolution, for example, or a devoted citizen of the global village, or an ardent proponent of any medium that manages to be its own message.

It wasn’t so.

McLuhan rarely, if ever, advocated anything.

“He wasn’t a champion of technology or opposed to technology,” says Logan. “He was neither a technophile nor a Luddite. All he wanted to do was make people aware of both sides of the coin.”

McLuhan himself went further.

“I am resolutely opposed to all innovation, all change,” he once said in a television interview, speaking with a characteristically inscrutable tone. (Was he serious? Or merely teasing?) “Anything I talk about is almost certain to be something I’m resolutely against.”

As for his predictions of an emerging global village of electronic connectivity — perceived by many as a sort of cyber promised land, an idyllic virtual oasis — McLuhan was under no illusions that our species’ digital destination would necessarily be agreeable or even tolerable.

“The global village is at once as wide as the planet and as small as a little town where everybody is maliciously engaged in poking his nose into everybody else’s business,” he once said.

With those few words, McLuhan effectively anticipated the ruthless phone-hacking culture that disgraced the News of the World, the British tabloid shut down by media magnate Rupert Murdoch earlier this month, with further consequences undoubtedly still pending.

Some oasis.

Another of McLuhan’s most famous insights — “the medium is the message” or “the massage,” as the concept is sometimes rendered — is also commonly misunderstood or not understood at all.

“Most people don’t get it,” says Federman.

While undoubtedly profound, the idea isn’t really that difficult to follow.

For example, the first passenger airplane was certainly significant but not because of the specific individuals it happened to be carrying on any given flight. It was significant because it heralded the emergence of passenger aircraft — a new medium.

Before you knew it, there were in-flight movies, airport limousines, frequent-flyer points cards, jet lag, 9/11, metal detectors, a war in Afghanistan, another war in Iraq, and a whole lot else.

It’s the medium, in other words, and not the cargo, that constitutes the message.

The same applies to cellphones, the Internet and all forms of electronic communication since Samuel Morse invented the telegraph.

This may seem almost obvious now, but the insight had the force of a lightning bolt more than 40 years ago, when McLuhan divined the idea.

“He realized that electronic communications were a second Creation,” says Powe. “Electronic technology has radically altered how the brain functions.”

McLuhan may have possessed “uncanny prophetic abilities,” in Powe’s words, but he was also a performer, a man who loved to devise riddles and games for public display, a penchant that was perhaps central to his genius.

“He was constantly at play,” says Logan. “Play, for him, was a serious concept.”

While dauntingly intelligent, McLuhan was seldom arrogant or patronizing.

“He was generous, witty, engaging,” says Powe. “He always began his classes with serious laughter. Every class began with a joke. Some were pretty good.”

In his late 60s, he suffered a stroke and considerable brain damage. Although still alert, he was unable to speak — a cruel blow for a man who thrived on words.

“He laboured on for a year,” says Logan. “We took walks in the park. I would share ideas with him, but he just couldn’t get the words out. He knew he was never going to regain his speech. Beethoven went deaf, and McLuhan went mute.”

On the final day of December 1980, Herbert Marshall McLuhan took his final breath, leaving behind a huge legacy of ideas — and no shortage of paradox.

Surprisingly, The First Seer of Cyberspace had little use himself for the shiniest gadgets of the postmodern age.

“His television was in the basement,” says Federman. “He didn’t drive a car. He avoided technology.”

And yet, like Charles Darwin or Albert Einstein before him, he reconfigured our world.

McLuhan’s Words of Wisdom

• The medium is the message.

• The medium is the massage.

• The effects come first; the causes, later.

• I can’t bear to read anything I have written.

• My statements are probes.

• Canada is the only country in the world that knows how to live without an identity.

• Art is anything you can get away with.

• Affluence creates poverty.

• Tomorrow is our permanent address.

• The trouble with a cheap, specialized education is that you never stop paying for it.

• We shape our tools and afterwards our tools shape us.

• I wouldn’t have seen it if I hadn’t believed it.

• I think of art, at its most significant, as a DEW line, a Distant Early Warning system, that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen to it.

• There are no passengers on Spaceship Earth. Everybody’s crew.

• Anyone who tries to make a distinction between education and entertainment doesn’t know the first thing about either.

The McLuhan Legacy Network is staging an upcoming series of media installations, panel discussions and other events — a program with the appropriately elusive title, Connecting the Visible with the Invisible. To learn more, visit www.mcluhan.net/festival-2011. The week-long festival runs from Monday, July 18 to Sunday, July 24. That program is just part of a larger, year-long feast of all things McLuhan-esque that’s sponsored by McLuhan100, an alliance of public and private institutions, including the City of Toronto, the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Information, the Ontario Cultural Attractions Fund, and Mozilla. For more information, visit www.mcluhan100.ca.

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